A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

I grew up in LA at a time when there were oil derricks everywhere. I had friends with rigs literally in their back yards, and when driving around LA or the Long Beach area, it was very common to see the grasshopper oil rigs pumping up and down, and the smell of oil as you went past. (FWIW, this is a "grasshopper" oil pumper. If you haven't seen one in action, the curved heads on the left bob up and down from the pivot in back.)

At the end of the year I got to thinking about life in LA and all the oil shocks and crises that have been in the news during 2010. And that made me think of a simple enough question:

When was the first productive oil well drilled in California? And.. for extra credit, who drilled it and where?

As I said, the first answer may (or may not) be the right one. One reason to doubt it is that the phrase "California's first productive well was drilled by the Union Matolle Company in California's Central Valley." can be found in lots of hits (including some in Russian), suggesting that the original text has been copied and recopied so many times that its source is unclear. This is one of those times when checking the source is really necessary!

When: 1865 / 1876Who: Union Mattole Oil Company / Charles Alexander Mentry (California Star Oil Works)Where: on the North Fork of the Mattole River near Petrolia (formerly, New Jerusalem and Petrolea) an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, California / near Mentryville in Pico Canyon, District Newhall, Los Angeles County, California

The answers depend on the definition of “productive" oil well or “commercial" oil well.

My search strategy:

Because I wanted to find a reliable, high quality piece of information, I started my search with the ext:pdf qualifier. My search strategy was: [first productive oil well drilled in California ext:pdf]

The first hit brought me to a document from the California Department of Conservation with the title:”Oil and Gas Production History in California” (ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/oil/history/History_of_Calif.pdf).The text says: “the Stanford Brothers refined and sold the first shipment of oil from the Mattole well, the first oil produced and refined from a California well. Reportedly, the refined “burning oil” sold for $1.40 per gallon.”

But reading on in this document I found: “However some development continued, the most important in Pico Canyon near Newhall. Here in 1876, well “Pico” 4 was completed, producing 30 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 300 feet. The well, the first truly commercial oil well in the state…..”

Other links when searching for [first productive oil well drilled in California mattole|matolle|”Pico Canyon”]: